Huff Po obtained a letter from Jeh Johnson, the new DHS secretary, to Sen. Dick Durbin where he claims deportation quotas aren't a good idea. That's a great, we agree, but we have a follow up question, "Are detention quotas ok?"

"I do not believe that deportation quotas or numeric goals are a good idea," Johnsonwrote in the letter, obtained by HuffPost and confirmed by Durbin's office. "As I stated above, in my view, immigration enforcement must be focused first on those who pose a threat to our national security, public safety and the integrity of our borders. If confirmed, I intend to continually evaluate the prosecutorial discretion guidelines of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure they are consistent with the Department's enforcement priorities."

In 2010, the head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told his staff to focus on deporting the most dangerous and violent undocumented immigrants. But an investigation by The Chicago Reporter found little change in the percentage of these deportations since then—nationally and in the agency’s Midwest region, which includes Chicago.

John Morton, who stepped down as director of the agency this past summer, issued the directive in a June 30, 2010 memo. Yet between 2010 and 2012, the number of people removed from the country who committed a serious felony or violent crime—what officials call the “priority 1” category—actually decreased slightly from 9.5 to 8.7 percent, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement data analyzed by the Reporter.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that stalled immigration reform would be a top priority once the fiscal crisis has been resolved.

"Once that's done, you know, the day after, I'm going to be pushing to say, call a vote on immigration reform," he told the Los Angeles affiliate of Spanish-language television network Univision.

The president's domestic agenda has been sidetracked in his second term by one problem after another. As he coped with the revelation of domestic surveillance programs, chemical weapons in Syria, and a fiscal battle that has shut down the U.S. government and threatens a debt default, immigration has been relegated to the back burner.

Homeland Security has been detaining undocumented immigrants under a quota that has been reaching record numbers in the last few years. Despite a decline in undocumented crossings in the US recently, Homeland Security's "bed mandate" policy is not stopping ICE officials from meeting their assigned quota. According to Nick Miroff, ICE is now detaining any "foreign-born" legal US resident that has committed a crime which makes them possibly eligible for deportation. Read more below.

KARNES CITY, Tex. — In the past five years, Homeland Security officials have jailed record numbers of immigrants, driven by a little-known congressional directive known on Capitol Hill as the “bed mandate.”

The policy requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep an average of 34,000 detainees per day in its custody, a quota that has steadily risen since it was established in 2006 by conservative lawmakers who insisted that the agency wasn’t doing enough to deport unlawful immigrants.

The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) released a report that indicated marijuana possession as one of the most popular offenses Undocumented Immigrants are detained for. This exceeds arrests for rape, murder and robbery. Amanda Reimen reports on how Immigrants are still being affected by marijuana policies despite the recent regulations on it.

As with any policy shift, the gradual regulation of marijuana in the United States will have implications for a wide variety of populations. Indeed, the removal of marijuana from the criminal justice system has already started. However, like the recent shift in marriage policies to allow same sex marriage, the impact from a policy change can often be slow to reach the immigration community. This leaves this population in limbo, even after the rest of the country assumes change has happened.

Recently, a report was released by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) that looked at holds placed on individuals in California by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and which suspected criminal activities were most likely to result in detainment. ICE is charged by the Department of Homeland Security to maintain public health and safety. So, one would assume that accusations of violent crimes would be the most likely reason for detaining an undocumented foreign national.

Assembly Bill 4, or the Trust Act, is sitting on California Governor Jerry Brown's desk. The clock is ticking on whether the governor will decide to put his signature to a law which would put the damper on federal immigration agents' ability to track and quickly place under custody arrestees who might be deportable. Immigrant advocates call it an important strike back against the Obama administration's Secure Communities program, which was intended to boost cooperation between local police agencies and federal immigration authorities and which those advocates say has led to a surge in deportations of people who committed no serious offenses.

Since Secure Communities was launched, after jails in California send arrestees' fingerprints to the FBI to be run against the feds' database, the FBI sends that information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for that agency to run against their own databases. If the ICE turns up somebody they think may be deportable, they can send an "immigration detainer" to the jail asking it to hold the individual in custody even if they've become otherwise eligible for release. The ICE then has forty-eight hours to send an agent to that jail to interview the individual and, if it deems necessary, place them in federal custody. The Trust Act would require jails to ignore those detainers, meaning if the detainee had met all the other requirements for release, the jail would have to let them go - unless that person had previously been convicted of certain serious crimes.

Federal immigration agents will be able to give greater leniency to parents who get caught up in the immigration system, according to an Obama administration policy directive released on Friday.

Immigration agents already have the authority to not pursue certain low-priority immigration offenders, including those who are parents of minors. But a new policy would formalize and broaden the special recognition granted to parents who are picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

NEW ORLEANS — The Orleans Parish sheriff will no longer honor many requests from the federal immigration authorities to detain people who are suspected of being here illegally, making New Orleans one of a growing number of jurisdictions to adopt such a policy and the first to do so in the Deep South

The policy, articulated in filings that accompanied a legal settlement in federal court, is similar to others that have been instituted since 2011 by Chicago, New York and Washington, several counties and the State of Connecticut.